


Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

by EnglishAsSheIsSpoke



Series: This Is How It Works [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27518167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke/pseuds/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke
Summary: Nile feels like she’s in a sitcom situation with three new roommates who are just… next level weird. Like, the past two weeks have been comedic in the degree to which they have been ludicrously unbelievable. She single-handedly raided an evil laboratory to save a team of immortals and busted out a penthouse window tackling the evil CEO of a pharmaceutical company, where a car and said CEO broke her fall. And she got up and walked away. And now she’s living in Spain and she’s immortal and also dead for all intents and purposes and she’s never going to see her family or friends again and today they’re going fishing in the local river, and it’s all so peaceful that Nile could just scream.
Relationships: Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: This Is How It Works [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2011234
Comments: 5
Kudos: 65





	Love, Blood, and Rhetoric

_“We're more of the love, blood and rhetoric school…”_

Nile feels like she’s in a sitcom situation with three new roommates who are just… next level weird. Like, the past two weeks have been comedic in the degree to which they have been ludicrously unbelievable. She single-handedly raided an evil laboratory to save a team of immortals and busted out a penthouse window tackling the evil CEO of a pharmaceutical company, where a car and said CEO broke her fall. And she got up and walked away. And now she’s living in Spain and she’s immortal and also dead for all intents and purposes and she’s never going to see her family or friends again and today they’re going fishing in the local river, and it’s all so peaceful that Nile could just scream.

They arrived at their destination in the early hours of the morning after twenty-three straight hours of driving, although Nile didn’t find that out until the following morning. She’d asked where they were going after they walked away from Booker and Andy had just said they were going for R & R, which was the kind of vague answer Nile suspected she was going to have to get used to. Nile was somehow ready to both sleep for a week and run for a mile just to stretch her legs. But she followed the others inside a house she could barely make out, was led up some stairs and after a bathroom was pointed out, ushered into a bedroom and left to collapse face first into the bed and sleep.

Despite her fatigue, Nile still wakes up early with the smell of coffee coiling through her morning haze. She dresses and finds the others in the kitchen. They’ve brought her to an estate on the outskirts of Écija, a town in Andalusia, Spain. Andy, Nicky and Joe are already up and eating by the time she joins them; it’s Andy who fills her in on where they are and what the plan for the next few weeks while Nicky put a pan of baked eggs, chorizo, and red peppers in front of her. It smells incredible but Nile doesn’t pick up her fork. They’re going to stay here on an olive farm, get their bearings, get their heads straight, and then talk to Copley about what they’re going to do moving forward. Her family probably has been told she’s KIA by now.

“Eat your eggs,” Andy says.

Nile eats the eggs. They _are_ delicious.

She gets up afterwards and leaves the pan on the table, walks out of the kitchen, out of the house, and out into the day. It’s hot as hell and there are fields and fields of olive trees laid out in front of her, all greenery and twisted branches in orderly rows. The blue sky stretches overhead. It’s beautiful like something made-up on a postcard. Nile feels like crawling out of her skin.

She goes back inside after wiggling her fingers and toes, does some box breathing, tells herself she’s awake and here and she’s gotta just take the next step, the next step, the next step.

Anyway Andy is struggling to recuperate, forgetting the time her wound will take to heal, so that’s something to think about instead. Nile institutes a morning and night check just to make sure Andy’s not ignoring an infection. All four of them are keyed up as hell, reacting to unexpected noises and jumping at shadows. None of them know whether Merrick had shared their information or whether someone who knew about them had got out of the building alive. Copley has concerns about the doctor, said she disappeared and he can’t find any record of a body. He’s working on it, not that any of them find that reassuring. Most of their accounts, their passports and IDs were created and managed by Booker. Even the passwords and codes. Without Booker, it’s probably going to be Copley sorting all of that out, but not yet. No one trusts him yet. 

Later she’ll ask about their regular lives when they weren’t being hunted by pharmaceutical companies, and finds out they had spent almost as much time apart as together, combining into configurations all around the world, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of two or three or all four together, coming together in planetary orbits. It wasn’t unusual for at least one of them to be away in the times between jobs. So the space where Booker had been isn’t weird because he isn’t there. It’s weird because in a way he still is. Every time they talk about avoiding attention, new identities, new safehouses, Booker’s in the room.

Nicky remains silent on the subject. Joe’s face twists into anger even though his eyes look more afraid than anything else. Andy looks worn when Booker’s shade lurks. Nile misses Dizzy and Jay. She misses easy jokes and nudges. She misses who she was two weeks ago. But every time she thinks about them, she thinks about how they looked at her afterwards. The way they drew back from her. _The only way is forward now._

The hacienda is large and old. The doors are heavy wood and the windows rattle in their frames. But it’s hot and the sun seems large and friendly here after London’s grim light and the trauma of Paris. It’s just hard to relax. Andy’s the worst at it, since everything she apparently would do to relax is too physical while they’re trying to get her to recuperate from a gunshot. Or involves alcohol. Nile has a feeling that her and Booker had a lot in common there, since he always seemed to have his flask at the ready. But none of them are particularly at ease.

So they go fishing for trout and carp, although Nile suspects the others are fishing and she’s doing something closer to watching them fish. Nicky and Joe get a little punt of a boat, push themselves out into the reservoir, while she and Andy stay safely on the shoreline. Their progress is unsteady and Nile’s putting it out to the universe, Secret style, that she would be super grateful if they accidentally tip the punt and fall in. She wants it so badly she’d even have vision boarded it if she had time. It would spark so much joy to see Nicky come out of the water like an angry cat. She’s trying to make it happen with her mind when Andy breaks the silence.

“This is the first time we’ve found one of us straight away, you know? It’s different this time.” Andy casts her line out in a single graceful gesture. She makes it look simple and easy. Nile eyes her line warily before trying to cast her line out like Andy had shown her. It flies out in a weak arc and gets caught in some weeds. “It took us decades to find Lykon, even longer for me to find Quynh before that. Nicky and Joe had each other but it was better once we were all together, and they could see it wasn’t just the two of them. Book took the shortest and even then it took a year to figure out where he was and travel there. By the time we got there, he’d settled back in with his family, his wife had just died, and he- he wasn’t willing to listen to anything we told him. You can learn a lot from our bad examples, kid. Skip a lot of angst.”

“Would you ever do what he did?”

“Never.” Andy’s voice is low, certain as stone, and just as hard. “But he didn’t get there by himself, and that’s on me.”

Nile turns it over and over in her mind. She still doesn’t know how to make it all fit. The inconsistency of what Booker did. Keeping secrets and turning them over to Merrick, while packing clothes for her and joking with Andy. His friendliness, his advice, the pain in his voice over a flickering fire, and the comradery between them all. She wishes he was here now.

Andy winds her reel, flicking the line. “You should make a list of places you want to go and things you’d like to learn. We’ll train you but if you have something you’re particularly interested in, make a note. Not just tactical skills either. Don’t forget things you enjoy for their own sake.”

“And what if I want to go home?”

Nile didn’t mean to say that. But now she has, she has to know the answer. The question feels like it’s been hanging over her head like an axe.

“If you want to- If you want to go home, we can… try to work it out. But Nile,” Andy’s eyes are implacable. “We left Booker with his sons and the worst part of that wasn’t how it hurt him. It was how it hurt them.”

She’s somehow found a bottle of something and she knocks back a slug of it. Nile doesn’t take it away. She just takes it and has a drink as well instead. It tastes like kerosene and burns and she hates it.

“Booker’s still got centuries to figure his shit out. But they only had one short lifetime and so much of it was spent in pain and confusion and fear. They could’ve mourned him and moved on, lived their lives as they were meant to. We could’ve watched over them from a distance. But we didn’t. And it was- it was the wrong choice. Easier, but wrong.”

Nile nods. She doesn’t know. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But she can’t gamble her family’s happiness and safety on the hopes that it’ll be different with them. It’s a hard choice, the hardest she imagines she’ll ever have to make. But to keep them safe, anything is worth that. She reels in her line and lands a tangle of weeds and muck.

“I want to learn sign language. And braille. And how to ride a horse. And stunt driving. And-”

Andy looks up at Nile, pleased as she leans back on the chair they insisted on bringing for her. The list migrates into a notebook, with suggestions from the others. Nile’s going to need eternal life just to keep up with her studies, apparently.

The next day, Nile feels like there are ants under her skin. Her sleep is broken, restless, even when she doesn’t dream. Andy has disappeared on one of her long hikes and Nicky is reading outside in the garden, but Joe seems to feel the same as her, pacing around the house, picking things up and putting them back down. He finally opens a cupboard and starts pulling out boxes, with no apparent rhyme or reason to what he’s trying to do. Mostly he’s just making a mess.

Nile needs a distraction. The military had her used to a hurry-up-and-wait life, always a little on edge. Now she keeps expecting something to happen. Something today, something in the next hour, something right around the corner. She needs a distraction and Joe’s right there, looking like he wants to relocate the entire house box by box, like that’ll achieve anything.

“Are you okay?”

“Nicolo and I fought. Are fighting.” Joe throws another box on top of the growing pile. “Arguing, debating, whatever you want to call it. We are at odds. We were talking about the nature of forgiveness. I told him that just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean you have to race towards it. Nicky is kind enough to forgive before it’s good for him, for any of us, to do so. But I worry that without consequence for our actions, our actions will cease to hold weight. It’s a dangerous path and I think for all his good intentions Nicky doesn’t see that it ends with us all becoming monstrous. And who can enforce those consequence except ourselves?”

Nile had suggested just an apology so she’s a little out of her depth in terms of talking the ethics of a hundred years of exile. It doesn’t matter since Joe asks then swears in a language Nile doesn’t recognise and kicks the pile of boxes, puts his hands on his hips and apparently decides his outburst was enough for one day. He asks about her list, what’s on there so far, what she’s thinking about adding. She mentions Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Joe’s face pulls in the way that means despite both of their efforts to change the topic she’s wandered straight back into the minefield she’s mentally labelled ‘Reminders of Booker’.

“I heard it’s good for if you’re smaller than your opponents.” There’s a moment where Nile knows she could lead the conversation away, talk about learning to throw knives and more Pashtun and how to make a risotto that Gordon Ramsey wouldn’t call her an idiot sandwich over. But she’s never been one to steer away from awkward topics. “Booker’s not a small guy so…”

“Why is it something he learned?” Joe throws up a hand in an emphatic ‘who can guess’ gesture. Nile waits. He huffs. Then he says, “It’s a skill of grappling and holds, not strikes. He felt… more comfortable with a martial art that was more strategic, I suppose. There’s no problem he can’t overcomplicate by trying out-think it rather than just go through it.”

Nile can’t help but notice the slipping between past and present tense. Booker wanted to die and it sometimes feels like he got his wish, with how they talk around him. Other times, it’s like he’s just in the other room.

Joe gives up on the pile of boxes, looks at them like he’s not even sure what he was looking for. “Come, I’ll teach you some judo so when Booker joins us again, you can kick his ass like he truly deserves. He’ll be delighted by that.”

They work out their energy on each other. Joe shows Nile some basic moves and Nile shows Joe what happens when she’s underestimated. He ends up on the floor while Nile laughs, bent over, hands on her knees before she reaches out to help him back to his feet.

Andy comes back from her hike, sweating and still looking like a damn amazon. She deftly avoids Nile’s query about her side and takes herself off to the bathroom, presumably to change the bandage before anyone can see she’s strained herself again and bled through her stitches. Nile and Joe exchange a look and follow after Andy to badger her into letting them check.

That afternoon, there’s a soccer game on the television. Joe turns it off. Then back on again. Then sits there with gritted teeth, glaring at the television. Nile exchanges a look with Andy, who just raises an eyebrow. This is how it goes, the new kid gets the shit detail. Better out than in, as her grandmom used to say, so Nile just up and asks:

“Hey Joe, are you… mad at the soccer?”

Calling soccer ‘soccer’ and not ‘football’ derails Joe from answering the actual question. Obviously Nile is going to call it soccer from now until the end of time, now that she knows it annoys Joe so much. While the game itself is boring as hell and ends in a goddamn draw, it’s kind of worth it to see Joe’s face as he explains the rules, the strategy, and confuses Nile endlessly with how offside works. And when Nicky comes inside, he sits on the armrest of the couch next to Joe, rests a hand on his shoulder, and smiles at Nile over Joe’s head as they listen to him complain about a ref or an umpire or whatever.

When Nile goes to bed, it’s to the sound of Joe laughing rough and low as Nicky says something _sotto_ voice in his ear. So it’s gonna be a headphones night tonight, but at least they seem to have settled whatever was going on there.

_Quynh screams and beats her fists against the metal, convulses in the pressure of the salt water, screams and screams and chokes and screams. She is a fire burning in a crucible of terror and fury and isolation. She chokes and screams and convulses and her body heals relentlessly, mercilessly, as she screams and screams and screams._

Nile wakes up with the taste of salt water in her throat, on her tongue, up her nose. The sting of it, the burn in her eyes. The weight of the water all around her and inside her lungs. It was claustrophobic, even without the added cage of the iron maiden. Nile kicks at the sheets tangled around her legs, throws the covers off, sits up and tries to calm down. She’s covered in sweat, clammy and hot and cold. She’s breathing too fast and it feels like there’s no oxygen in the room. Like she’s still down there in the dark.

It takes a minute for Nile to shake it off, stand up, and stagger down to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of water. Nicky is there alone with just one dim lamp for light, sitting at the table with a teapot and cup of steaming tea.

She pauses in the doorway. “Can’t sleep?”

He nods.

“Me neither, I guess. Mind if I join you?”

Nicky gestures at the chair next to him, offering an invitation. He looks at her for a few seconds and whatever he sees prompts him to say, “I dreamt that we were all back in the laboratory and Booker was watching them carve pieces from Joe, and I could do nothing. Booker was weeping but nothing I said could make him help us. I could not sleep after that but I didn’t wish to wake Joe. And the kitchen brings me comfort, no matter where we are. Where food is made is the beating heart of a home.”

Jesus. He's way too articulate for this time of night. Nile doesn’t know where to begin with all that. So she sits down and instead asks, “What kind of tea is this?”

Nicky leans back in his chair to each for another cup off the sideboard. He pours a cup and places it in front of her. “Chamomile. Calming and mild.”

The tea is a soft amber, fragrant, and the cup is warm in her hands. Nile takes a sip and savours the mild taste, the earthy herbal tones that slowly washes away the taste of fetid salt.

“Is this what you do when you have nightmares?”

“I haven’t had dreams like this for a long time. I forgot how real they can feel.”

Maybe it’s because she still feels like the bottom of the ocean is hiding behind her eyes, maybe it’s because it’s always simpler at night to say what she thinks. “I just, I don’t understand why me. Why us? Why do we have the dreams and why do we just up and die one day? I feel like if I knew the reason, it would all be… easier.”

Nicky’s silent for long enough that for anyone else she’d assume he doesn’t want to answer. “It’s difficult to reconcile who we are without knowing where it comes from, why it has been placed on us. But I believe that we are meant to be together. We have been given a heavy gift. The burden is upon us to do the right thing with this gift as best we can until our time comes. Together at least we can help each other carry it.”

“But,” Nile puts on her best poker face, “What if it’s aliens?”

Finally it goads a smile out of Nicky. “You know, when we first found him, Booker asked me if the immortality was a pact with the devil. He said that he would sell his soul if it would save his family.”

Nile laughs. That’s so goddamn ridiculously on brand for what she knows about the Frenchman. “Does Booker believe in God?”

“No, he didn’t. Doesn’t. As far as I am aware.” Nicky’s smile is sad and amused. “That would not have stopped him though. He has always been… flexible in that way.”

The teacup is almost empty and Nile can feel the dream slipping away again, fading into whisps and foggy nothing. The only reason it lingers now is because she can’t stop turning over the thought that just because she’s woken up doesn’t mean the drowning has stopped happening to Quynh right now at this very moment, over and over again. Like tonguing a raw cut in her mouth, Nile keeps prodding at the monstrous idea of it. She’s tired and she doesn’t want to go back to sleep because she’s afraid like a child of her dreams.

“Did- does Booker have the dreams of Quynh too?”

“Yes. For many years.”

Of all of them, Nicky has the kindest eyes, Nile thinks, and kind eyes can make a terrible truth sound bearable. Still. Years of this. Nile feels like crawling into a hole in the ground. “They stopped though? I mean, when I told you all about the dream, you were surprised.”

“I’m not certain now they did, though Booker told us a long time ago that they came less and less often until they were gone altogether. Perhaps he lied about that as well. He drank a lot, Nile, and he said it helped, but I can’t believe that’s true. It only… it only seemed to drown him in another way.”

Because it’s 3am and she’s so tired she could cry from the grit in her eyes, Nile says what she’s been afraid to say. “It hurts Andy when she sees me have them. Every time I wake up, she’s looking at me all she can see is Quynh and I’m still drowning. I don’t want to keep hurting her.”

Nicky puts his teacup down and reaches for her hand, holds it gently between his, and makes sure she’s meeting his eyes when he says, “Nile, please don’t hide your pain from us. It isn’t always like this.”

“That’s funny, Booker told me the exact same thing.”

The following silence is long and heavy.

“Well, in some things he was right.”

They drink tea and sit together until the sun starts to come up. Andy gets up and wants to go for a run with her, although Nile is so full of liquid she has to stop twice to squat behind a tree. Andy outpaces her even though she has a hole in her side, which is pretty embarrassing until Nile reminds herself she’s only 26 and not a million years old or whatever. Give her a millennium or so and her post-gunshot cardio will be at its peak too. Andy still teases her over it though.

When they get back, Nicky and Joe have made eggs and toasted thick slices of bread, and whatever had kept Nicky from sleeping peacefully seems to have passed for now.

It’s Nile who suggests a family dinner in the garden. She’s in Spain, for fuck’s sake, and sure, everything’s still a goddamn mess and everyone’s working through some shit, but she wants to drink Spanish beer in the sun and eat fresh food and just, like, have a fun afternoon. She just spent two traumatising weeks having her entire worldview and life thrown through a cement mixture and for two years before that she was a marine and .

That afternoon they dress whole mackerels with lemon slices and tomato and herbs, wrap them in foil and throw them in the coals of a fire pit Nicky has built up in the garden, along with some potatoes. Nicky has made the salad, dressed it with his own mix since none of the rest of them can be trusted not to over or under season anything. Nile and Joe play tag around the pool while they wait for the fish to cook, Andy and Nicky yelling advice, suggestions, laughing as Nile trips Joe into the water but is caught and tugged in with him. The water, she is relieved to find, is like bath water from the sun, fresh and warm, nothing like the ocean. She dries in the sun sitting on the side of the pool, her legs dangling in the water as she drinks an ice cold Cruzcampo that Nicky offers her.

When the fish and potatoes are ready, they’re plucked from the coals and each of them unwraps their dinner with careful fingers, pulling apart the fish and blowing on their hot fingertips. Nile watches Joe eat a piece too quickly and suck in a breath to cool his tongue, loves the ordinariness of it, the familiar humanity of it. They eat slices of fresh bread and salad, tomatoes ripe and tangy from their own garden. They drink wine from a dusty bottle found in the basement, not from glasses but shared hand-to-hand from the bottle. The sun sets but the heat of the day barely dissipates. The frogs come out in a chorus. Then the stories begin.

Andy starts, probably because Joe and Nicky still seem uncertain about what they should and shouldn’t talk about. She talks about a time Quynh rescued a Rashtrakuta king who fell in love with her. She talks about Lykon, the one who showed they could still die and would sooner or later, how he was a pain in her ass and made every day a little funnier. Nicky talks about a beloved pet donkey who somehow managed to climb up the stairs to the second story of their house of the time and how the attempt to remove it became an hours-long farce that ended with Joe being kicked out a second story window and the donkey fleeing into the field.

Finally it’s Joe who says to Nile with a straight face, “When you can, ask Booker about Constantinople.”

Andy and Nicky burst out into guttural laughter, the uncontrollable kind that comes deep inside. Nile rolls her eyes even while smiling at them, all too familiar with being the newbie, not knowing the tall tales and in-jokes and having to be patient until she’s as enmeshed with them as they are with each other.

Andy sits down at last, the basically-still-open bullet hole in her side only given away by how careful she is. She offers a toast to them all and clears her throat, the smile on her face drifting into certainty in the flickering firelight:

“I have something for Nile’s list.”

Joe and Nicky fall silent at the tone of her voice. Nile sits up. The mood shifts from festive to something like a bated breath, the moments between a crack of lightning and the rumble of its thunder.

“I only have forty or fifty years now. I want to search for Quynh again. We know she’s still alive. Nile has the dreams. And I can’t- I can’t go without doing this. I left her there. I let them take her. I need to bring her back, even if it’s the last thing I do. Especially if it’s the last thing I do.”

“It would be my honor to do this with you, boss,” Joe is the first to answer, the first to show support, the first to take Andy’s hand.

“Of course, Andromache,” Nicky follows up. “For as long as it takes.”

Nile nods, the corners of her lips rising into a grin. “Let’s do it. Let’s find her.”

Right now, in this moment, they can do anything. Together they can beat the world. When she dreams, she’ll try to let Quynh know they’re coming, she’s not alone, she’s not lost forever. And when Nile wakes, she’ll write down every detail, every tiny thing that might be able to help them. With a purpose, they won’t be unbearable. They’ll be the start of something new.

Joe silently pulls Nicky to his feet and leads him back to the house. They’re so gentle and soft with each that it makes something in Nile’s heart glow to see it, a warmth that has nothing to do with the firelight. Andy is next, stretching out on her lounge instead of going inside. Nile raises an eyebrow and Andy smiles at her, turns her face towards the sky, still smiling, still lit up. “I want to feel the sun rise around me.” Then, with the ease of someone ancient, she closes her eyes and drops into sleep.

It’s only been a few weeks and Nile doesn’t miss her family yet. Or she still misses them the way she had when she was a marine, and she didn’t expect to see them for months. Like a volcano starting to release groans and heaves of smoke, she can feel the homesickness looming on the horizon, the longing for her mom and her brother. But there’ll also be horse riding with Andy and Nicky’s pasta and Joe’s tahtib lessons. One day she’ll take on Booker at jiu jitsu and make him tap out with a shocked look on his face, collect her winnings from Nicky while Joe and Andy laugh. They’re going to help people. They’re going to find Quynh. They’re going to make the world a better place.

Nile puts her earbuds in, presses play on ‘Shadow Man’, and waits for the light to slowly fill the morning like a rising tide. 

**Author's Note:**

> Series title is from 'On The Radio' by Regina Spektor. Story title and quote is from 'Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead' by Tom Stoppard.


End file.
